Last Saturday I found out about AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s computer capable of beating the European champion at the game Go; it uses “deep neural networks that have been trained by supervised learning, from human expert games, and by reinforcement learning from games of self-play“, and it’s still unknown if humans can beat it.

Watching the project’s website I noticed the copyright at the bottom and thought: is DeepMind actually aligned with Google’s business goals? A quick look to their mission statement refreshed my memory:

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I returned my Chromecast. I played with it for about a week but I found its Achilles’ heel the moment I casted my first video. This is how it happened.

I have a secondary TV where I wanted to be able to watch Hulu and other media channels without spending too much money. After some investigation, I found that one of the cheapest solutions was Chromecast, at only $35.

Two features in particular caught my attention: Chromecast is a small dongle that connects to the HDMI port of any TV, and any device with Android, iOS or Windows can be used to stream a video to your TV. Since I normally stream videos to my Xbox 360 using my Dell Venue 8 Pro (the Play feature included in Windows 8.1 is awesome), I thought it would be very convenient to do a similar thing with Chrome and its Google Cast extension. I didn’t need anything else!

It has been a while now that Google announced it would close Google Reader, one of the most popular RSS readers, and since then lots of services and apps have rushed into what looked like a race to be the “best alternative”.

Digg launched its own version, Feedly also started working nonstop on its own independent infrastructure (which successfully launched), and it was rumored that even Facebook was working on some sort of reader.

Now, why did Google finish its Reader? According to Richard Gingras, Senior Director of News & Social Products at Google:

As a culture we have moved into a realm where the consumption of news is a near-constant process. Users with smartphones and tablets are consuming news in bits and bites throughout the course of the day — replacing the old standard behaviors of news consumption over breakfast along with a leisurely read at the end of the day.